The Growing Edge is brought to you by Valent USA. I asked Todd Berkdahl, what do almond growers have to look at heading into late April and early May? You’ve got the disease complex depending on your orchard configuration, irrigation, whatnot, whether or not we get any more rain. I would be scouting for haltonaria showing up, also rust.
You know, we had a fair amount the last couple years, so I’m sure there’s enough inoculum out there, spores floating around from, dead stuff on the ground and on the trees and just, you know, everywhere. So if you’ve got the disease triangle fulfilled, you’ve got the hosts, which is the almond tree, the pathogen, which is the spores from the rust, the haltonaria, and then the conditions or the environment that’s conducive to the disease. And so, you know, if you’ve got an old orchard that’s broad spaced, you know, 20 plus feet apart on the trees, they’ve been pruned every couple of years or whatever, probably not going to be as much pressure as, you know, in a tightly higher density planting.
High density plants tend to create their own microclimate and in the irrigation too as well, that can enhance it. But you need to be on the watch for those two pathogens because they can come on quick and they can defoliate the trees pretty rapidly too, given the right conditions. So a timely application of fungicide, you know, mix it up, you know, with different chemistries, choose the chemistries that work well on those diseases.
I recommend going to the UC IPM guidelines that Dr. Adaskavich, you know, updates almost every year with the basic, all the chemistries that are available and their ratings, their rankings, again, using something, you know, a combination back and forth, rotation, alternating chemistries is good. Follow your fungicide resistance guidelines as they’re always, that’s always a plus. And then you’ve got weed control, you know, weeds are starting to pop up your summer annuals, grass, especially along the irrigation emitters.
And if it’s on drip or on micro sprinklers, you’re going to see those starting to pop through as the water degrades your pre-emergent program, depending on when it was put on, the longevity of pre-emergence is not, you know, forever, but it’s pretty good, but it’s not forever. And so you’ll see the breaks usually in where there’s water and that’s where the seed from the summer annuals is going to pop through. Also, you know, spurge is a really good indicator that the herbicide is breaking down.
If you see spurge around the, down the drip line or the, you know, around the sprinkler heads starting to pop up, that’s a good, because spurge will germinate in like the top, practically half a millimeter of soil, maybe probably one millimeter of soil. And it’s a good bio indicator that herbicide is degrading. And if the spurge starts popping through, you know, you probably need to go in there and either boost it or put a post application on some kind of contact material to burn it back.
And then we’ve got leaf-wooded plant bud, which is, I saw some yesterday. It was a block of pomegranates that was next to a block of almonds and the almonds were being, you know, invaded by the lack of sanitation in the pomegranate block. A lot of mummified fruit on the ground.
And I went around and looked and there was, you know, a lot of nymphs in those, leaf-wooded plant bud nymphs in those mummified pomegranates on the ground, even though they’re basically deteriorating rotten. You open them up and it’s like, wow, it’s like a rat’s nest of leaf-wooded plant bud in there. And they’re going to be going through their metamorphological stages, becoming adults and flying around like B-52s out in the almond orchard looking for a nut to sting.
And when they sting them, it makes it, you know, kills the nut basically. At least it stops, usually stops growing. And you need to knock those boogers out before they get in.
So keep in mind, leaf-wooded plant bud, you can see them. I mean, they’re out there. They’ll sit on the trees.
A lot of them are copulating right now. You’ll see the males and females, adults copulating, getting ready to lay more eggs. And so that’s, you know, get them now while they’re doing that.
They’re kind of, you know, in that mode. So you can, they don’t fly away as readily because they will fly out in front of a sprayer. They’ll move as you come to the orchard.
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